Martin Wolf PublishedYESTERDAY 509 Print this page Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. First came the war. Then came the blockade. Now come the shortages. The tankers full of essential commodities — oil, liquid natural gas, urea, refined oil products, hydrogen, helium and so forth — have not sailed through the Strait of Hormuz since the end of February. Those that left before the closure have mostly arrived. From now on, the shipments that did not leave will increasingly be missed. As inventories are also drawn down, we will move into an era of physical shortages. Up to now, shortages have been mostly imaginary. Now they will become real. They must be managed, ultimately by suppressing demand. The latter in turn will require some combination of rationing and recession. A blend of higher prices with tighter monetary policy could deliver both. The longer the strait remains closed and the bigger ...
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Hamas’s sexual terrorism is laid bare and still the world chooses to look the other way Camilla Long The scene of Hamas atrocities at the Nova music festival on October 7, 2023. Exhaustive witness accounts were published last week in the report by the Civil Commission Next image › There are many ways evil people attack those they hate. First and foremost, they physically harm them. They burn, rape and kill. Then they shame and terrorise them: celebrating massacres, live-streaming murders. But there is one weapon far more devastating than all of this. It’s cheap and widely available. That weapon is, of course, silence. To read any one of the 298 pages of the Civil Commission’s report, published last week, on the rapes carried out by Hamas on October 7 is to be plunged back into hell. There is not only the graphic horror of it — the maimings, the torture, the shocking sexual violence — but the knowledge that, in the days, months and years after it happened, many people preten...
Navigated Menu Back Financial Times Financial Times UK 6 May 2026 Buttons.Search Options Imbalances are back on the global agenda Martin Wolf Economics martin.wolf@ft.com Settings Translate Article Print Share Listen Policymakers must overcome the fallacy that the way to get rich is by running surpluses forever Again? Didn’t we just have this debate?” This is how the opening chapter of a collection of essays published by the Centre for Economic Policy Research, on “The New Global Imbalances”, starts. Yes, we did. We did so in the 1980s, in the 2000s and now, once again, in the 2020s. Once roughly every 20 years, it appears, the issue comes to the fore. This is so for two good reasons. One is that current account imbalances drive protectionist sentiment. The other is that they are harbingers of financial crisis. In the 1980s, protectionist sentiment rose against Japan, which is also where the financial crisis struck. In the 2000s, the era of “the...